Over the past few years, shopping on the Internet using on-line merchants has become popular. Customers shop on the Internet because they can check a large variety of products (and services) from many different manufacturers and other providers, literally from any corner of the world. Customers can also compare offers from different sources to determine which offer is the most attractive.
Moreover, merchants also find selling on the Internet very advantageous because the Internet gives them access to customers from many different places. Moreover, merchants can display information about the various products (including pictures, description, technical specifications, etc.) on line and therefore the merchant does not have to maintain an inventory of the products in stock or samples of the product. The on-line merchants can also present to potential customers reviews from other customers related either to particular products or the merchants.
Before the rise in the popularity of on line shopping, when making a decision, a customer had to rely mostly on advertisements about a product or listen to sales pitches from salespeople. Since the advertisements or sales pitches came from the manufacturers or other interested parties, the information from such advertisements was inherently suspect. Some information was also available from allegedly unbiased third parties, such as consumer groups or government agencies, but even this information could be suspect and was not easy to obtain. Moreover, the information from these third parties was limited to very popular products.
However, with the advent of the on line shopping, review sources, including other customers have also become available on the Internet for a wider variety of products. As a result, one interesting and somewhat unexpected phenomenon associated with shopping on the Internet is that online customers tend not to rely on traditional advertisements. Instead, anecdotal information suggests that a majority of Internet customers rely more on on-line reviews than on any other information source.
One problem with on-line reviews is that they are presently not well very organized and are frequently platform and device neutral. In many situations, how a product (and especially a software product) performs is very dependent on the platform that for which it has been designed; and/or the platform on which it is actually running. If a software product has been designed for one platform or device and is being used on a different platform or device, the software product may not perform in the same manner or may not run consistently on a different device or platform. In fact, in many situations, the version of the platform and/or the device may make the difference between a software product running perfectly and a software product running erratically, if at all. For example, a software product may run well on one manufacturer's device but not on another manufacturer's similar device, even though both may be using the same version of an operating system. Alternatively, a software product may be running well on only one of two devices devices when the two devices are identical in all aspects except that one runs an earlier version of an operating system than the other.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a system that overcomes the above-described problems with on-line reviews of products.